When you have command line arguments to parse (whether in Windows or Linux), the place to look is Mono.Options . To date, I have not found anything better to get the job done. It is a single C# file if you do not want to download the entire Mono Library...

I’m a huge fan of NHibernate . It has excellent documentation and just makes the whole job of getting things into and out of the database much more enjoyable. There is a whole series of posts on NHibernate from one of the committers, Ayende . ...